ITV
theartsdesk
Bruce Springsteen once sang about there being "57 channels and nothin' on". Those were the days. Now we have so much to watch (including Netflix's Springsteen on Broadway) that all the world's remaining elephants couldn't remember them all.But stress not. Theartsdesk's critics have bent themselve to the herculean task of sifting the annals of 2018 to find the most nutritious nuggets and the most noxious no-hopers. Among these, you may even find the odd specimen of that supposedly defunct species, the "appointment to view" programme. Oddly, despite what the media gurus like to tell us, viewers Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was when he was on holiday at his agreeable estate in the Algarve in August 2014 that Cliff Richard got a phone call telling him his Berkshire home was being raided by the South Yorkshire Police. It was the beginning of a four-year ordeal in which accusations of “historical sexual offences” threatened to crush the veteran entertainer, formerly believed to be indestructible. “I thought I was going to die,” he confessed in this documentary. “Supposing I had a heart attack?”Sir Cliff was never charged and, after launching legal actions, received apologies and hefty chunks of compensation from Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After seeming to spend an interminable amount of time wandering around in a daze and blundering up blind alleys, Strangers finally gathered its wits and cantered towards the finishing tape with a renewed sense of purpose in the final two episodes. One couldn’t feeling that if two or three of its eight instalments had been surreptitiously hidden behind the dustbins round the back of ITV Mansions, few would have been any the wiser.In the end, university professor Jonah Mulray (John Simm, revealing an aptitude for morbid dullness which he’d previously kept to himself) got most of the answers he’ Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Awesome numbers: over a million miles, the equivalent of 42 times around the globe, have been traversed by Her Majesty the Queen, enabling visits over the past seven decades or so to 117 different countries. No one has reigned longer nor travelled further.For various reasons, obviously co-incident with the death of the British Empire, she has felt a special attachment to the Commonwealth,which (with the recent return of Gambia) includes some 53 countries, some rather surprisingly with no particular history with Britain. Queen Elizabeth pledged her life to the service of the Commonwealth, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You might consider it odd that a man whose wife spends half the year in Hong Kong without him hasn’t managed to get around to catching a plane from Heathrow to visit her in the Far East, but that is the case with Jonah Mulray, the stressed-out protagonist of Strangers. Jonah’s excuse for his marital negligence is that he’s “scared of flying”.In last week’s opening episode, he was forced to conquer his terror of leaving the ground by the traumatic news that his wife Megan (Dervla Kirwan) had been killed in a road accident. As soon as he arrived in Hong Kong, everything looked exceedingly fishy Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Emcee Michael Palin, as William Makepeace Thackeray himself, introduces us to the show: “Yes, this is Vanity Fair; not a moral place certainly; nor a merry one, though very noisy.” All his major characters – or “puppets” – are riding a fairground carousel. They – and very soon, we – are having a great time.Vanity Fair – the title comes from The Pilgrim’s Progress, in which the town of Vanity holds a year-round fair – charts the uncertain progress of a minx called Becky Sharp (Olivia Cooke, pert and pretty in equal measure, main picture). First seen giving lip to her elder and better Miss Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the ever-expanding field of broadcast, it’s easy to get lost in the deluge of product raining down from swaggering global providers who sometimes seem to have more money than critical acumen. How gratifying, then, that some of the best of British TV over this past year has been carefully nurtured and home-grown in Wales, where writers, actors and producers have been punching well above their weight, as well as introducing international viewers to the musical lilt of the Welsh language and doing a sterling sales job for the Welsh tourist board.Thus among our h 100 nominees are Ed Talfan, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Belatedly picking up from where series 2 of The Bletchley Circle left off in 2014, this comeback version has a go at transporting a couple of the original characters to the Californian West Coast, where they embroil themselves in the hunt for that old chestnut, a serial killer. On the evidence of this first of four episodes, it would be difficult to conclude that their journey was really necessary.Sadly, Anna Maxwell Martin hasn’t returned for this one, but it does bring back her co-stars Rachael Stirling as Millie Harcourt and Julie Graham as Jean McBrian. It’s 1956, and the women’s heady Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
So it’s back to London’s Bishop Street police station for a third series of screenwriter Chris Lang’s cold case saga. The understated rapport of lead duo DI Cassie Stuart (Nicola Walker) and DS Sunny Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar) has become one of TV’s mini-treasures, and it was all present and correct in this opening episode.It started, as these things often will, with the discovery of a body. Workmen were digging a drainage trench at the bottom end of the M1 when they chanced upon what turned out to be a human hip bone. The rest of the skeleton wasn’t far away, and soon forensic bods were poring Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Addressing the baying media on the steps of the courthouse after being acquitted of murdering his wife, for which non-crime he’d spent the last seven years in prison, David Collins (Lee Ingleby) was a bitter and angry man. He wanted to expose the people who’d fitted him up, he wanted his children back, and he aimed to find out who really killed his wife Tara.Three episodes in, he’s been doing pretty well with his personal checklist. We know for sure that he’s innocent, he’s been remarkably successful in building bridges with his children (especially his son Jack), he’s found a sympathetic ear Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
QCC isn’t the name of a new football club, nor some higher qualification for those toiling at the Bar, but stands for "Queen’s Commonwealth Canopy". Had you heard of it? On the eve of the Commonwealth conference, along came Jane Treays's gently hilarious, and finally rather tender film to fill in the gaps. Its central focus was on the nation’s favourite nonagenarians, the Queen herself and Sir David Attenborough, pottering about and chatting in a garden – that quintessential English idyll – and not just any old garden, but that of Buckingham Palace. Quietly, they talk about saving the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
When ITV scheduled this new series of The Durrells for mid-March, they probably didn’t imagine it would coincide with the return of the Beast from the East, with its blizzards and plummeting temperatures. Under these deep-frozen circumstances, what could be more reassuring than to batten down the hatches and take a trip to the glittering Mediterranean and the mountains, blue skies and historic architecture of Corfu?Profundity is not the ambition of Simon Nye’s dramatisations of Gerald Durrell’s books. In our age of knotty and treacherously-plotted thrillers, full of mutilated corpses and Read more ...